Umm.. let me see. The last time I bought a spindle of 100 years ago (of which I'm still workng on), Verbatim was the best. Unless something has changed.

I can also vouch for verbatim.

The trouble is that any one brand may buy their discs from different manufacturers, so there's no way of telling in advance where the discs from one particular brand may have come from.

Taiyo Yuden tends to be highly recommended, if that's an option. (They make their own discs and sometimes supply them to other brands.) Except, of course, that mans there are "fake" Taiyo Yuden discs out there.
See http://www.ebay.com/gds/BEWARE-OF-FAKE-Taiyo- … 01423203/g.html .

Taiyo Yuden is the best money can buy. JVC used to sell them as well under its own brand.

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

Taiyo Yuden is the best money can buy. JVC used to sell them as well under its own brand.

Yes, their were the best. Plextor also used them.

Yep JVC Taiyo Yuden are great. But Taiyo Yuden have shut down production seemingly, so I'm not sure what's good now.
Back in the day I loved Verbatim Metal AZO discs, the original 74 minute versions with the hard white top.

I've had nothing but good results with Philips DVD+Rs. Memorex and Imation are pretty good, too.

Memorex (or whoever they sourced from) used to be crap 5+ years ago. I still use them given no choice but definitely prefer Verbatim.

How many CDR manufacturing companies are left in the world? Demand isn't what it used to be and prices seem too cheap for companies to bother competing to make them.

For anything I plan to keep I use TDK, one offs for setting up machines Ridata is fine.

I don't burn them like I used to, networking is faster and USB keys are cheap. Still useful for audio.

The only CDRs I have which seem to have noticeably discoloured are Memorex. Kept in the dark, and dry, for over 10 years alongside others of similar age [mainly Imation and Philips] which haven't. They still seem to be readable though.

I used to always buy the cheapest, most available disks on the market, from a no-name brand common in this neck of the woods. The oldest ones are ~15 years old at this point, and many of them are already unreadable / partially unreadable. But all of them that are <10 years old have developed no issues yet (unless they failed immediately at the time of burn).

I find that Verbatim is the way to go. Their blue-dyed AZO discs are without a doubt the best, but I don't know if they make those anymore, although you can still buy packs on Amazon, for now at least. I still find single sealed jewel-cased discs at Goodwill sometimes.

The new ones are manufactured by CMC Magnetics instead of Mitsubishi who made the AZO discs, but as far as I can tell they're still good. Burnt 20 discs out of 50 so far and haven't had an error yet.